There is a particular kind of conversation that only happens when you get developers, planners and designers in the same room. The polite consensus thins out, the data sharpens, and the underlying tensions in our industry become difficult to ignore. Place North West’s recent residential development session in the North was one of those conversations, and it left us thinking hard about where this market is heading.
What follows is a summary of what struck us most, and why the questions raised matter for anyone designing or delivering homes today.
Serving the whole market, not just one segment
The opening session set the tone with a clear-eyed look at the built-to-rent (BTR) residential pipeline across the North. Build-to-rent includes: multi-family in city & town centres, single-family in suburban locations, and co-living for younger renters who want the social dimensions and lower costs.
What came through strongly was the importance of looking at the whole market rather than chasing the loudest segment. People do not stay in one tenure or one property type for life. They may graduate from co-living to a one-bedroom apartment, from a city centre flat to a family home, from full ownership in their fifties to something more manageable in their seventies. A healthy place serves all of those moments.
This constant evolution has design implications, it means thinking about a development not as a single product but as a long-term ecosystem with options for everyone. The most resilient places offer both, BTR and owner-occupier provisions.
The shift from private amenity to community infrastructure
One of the more interesting conversations of the morning was around amenity. For years, the standard residential pitch has involved a private gym, a private workspace, a private cinema room, sometimes a private pool. These are still there, but the appetite for cutting them down, or removing some entirely, is growing.
The reason is partly economic, but it is also philosophical. A private gym used by a handful of residents is a commercial liability. A community-supported leisure facility used by hundreds, including the wider public, is an anchor that strengthens the place. The current conversation is about whether developers should be reducing private amenity provision on site and reinvesting that space and that funding into facilities that benefit a much broader group.
It is the same instinct behind the move toward mixed-use ground floors, walkable neighbourhoods and ground-floor uses that earn their keep. Done well, it is a more generous, more democratic model of urban living. Done badly, it is a way of stripping out amenity and calling it community.
The master developer model and supporting local SMEs
Urban Splash gave one of the most thought-provoking presentations of the day, talking about their recent role as a Master Developer. The point that landed with us was about scale and inclusion.
A large site led by a single developer typically gets built out by a small number of national contractors. The local supply chain misses out. The local design talent misses out. The character of the place reflects a national playbook rather than the specific people and businesses already working in the area.
Urban Splash’s approach has been to use the master developer position as an umbrella, parcelling off elements of the site to local SMEs, smaller developers and specialist designers. The result is more variety on the ground, a stronger local economy, and a place that feels rooted rather than parachuted in.
This is something we have advocated for in our work in Stockport and across the North. There is a real difference between a place that has been delivered and a place that has been grown. The master developer model, used well, allows the latter at the scale of the former.
What actually creates a great place
The afternoon focused on what high-quality place creation looks like in practice. The themes will be familiar to anyone who reads urban design literature, but the case studies were sharper than usual.
Public transport, walkable neighbourhoods, the removal of the private car as the default mode of movement. Genuine green infrastructure rather than a token square of grass between blocks. Climate-positive engineering at the scale of the development rather than the individual home.
The example that stood out was a proposal in York combining communal ground-source heating with waste heat from a data centre, supporting a heated public Lido as part of the public realm. It is the kind of joined-up thinking that turns a residential development into a piece of city infrastructure that actually gives something back. Heat that would otherwise be vented to the sky becomes a year-round community asset.
This is the standard the industry is now talking about. The question is whether we can deliver it at scale.
The funding tension nobody wants to name
The session closed for us with a quiet but very real concern: that the consensus on what creates a great place may not exist in the funding structures required for delivery.
Almost everyone in the room agreed on the principles. Mixed tenure, community amenity, walkability, low-carbon infrastructure, master developer-led inclusion of local SMEs. The trouble is that the funding models behind much of the current pipeline still reward different things: the highest unit yield, the fastest exit, the simplest delivery vehicle, the strongest ROI.
There is a real risk that the projects we celebrate at industry events are not the projects that get built when the spreadsheets come out. The work of the next few years is to help highlight the values of good design to align the two more honestly. That means being clearer with funders about what high-quality place creation actually pays back, on what time horizons, and with what wider community benefit.
It also means designers, developers and planners holding the line on principle when the easy option is to compromise. That is a difficult conversation, and it is one we are very willing to keep having.
Closing thought
Days like this are valuable not because they introduce new ideas, but because they confirm that the people doing the most thoughtful work in our industry are largely on the same page. The challenge ahead is not invention, it is alignment, and it is courage at the moments where money pulls the design in another direction.
At Buju, this is the work we are most interested in. If you are planning a residential scheme in the North and want to talk about how to design it for the long term rather than the next financial year, we would love to hear from you.